Nora Zietz, formerly director of the Abell Venture Fund
of the Abell Foundation, has been appointed director of the
Enterprise Development Office at The Johns Hopkins
University, a unit created to establish new relationships
with business, taking advantage of the university's
expertise and commercializing its research and
technology.

Simultaneously, William P. Tew, an assistant dean at
the university's School of Medicine, has been appointed to
direct the university's new
Office of
Licensing and Technology Development. The office will
consolidate in one organization the efforts to license
technology developed in all eight of the university's
schools.

"Taken together, the creation of these offices and the
appointments of these two very able leaders signify a
concerted effort by Johns Hopkins to improve our
interactions with the business community, and to strengthen
the university's technology commercialization activities,"
said Steven Knapp, provost and senior vice president for
academic affairs.

The Enterprise Development Office is the university's
response to the widely recognized need for more effective
interaction with the business community, said Theodore O.
Poehler, the university's vice provost for research.

"Johns Hopkins exists both to advance knowledge and to
put knowledge to work for the good of humanity," Poehler
said. "The EDO's job is to find new ways to accomplish that
second goal, to find new relationships with business -- well
beyond conventional means of technology transfer -- that
will bring the benefits of Johns Hopkins expertise, research
and technology to the public."

"Our goal," Zietz said, "will be to seek opportunities
for Johns Hopkins to play a more extensive and sophisticated
business role through participation in alliances,
partnerships, consulting agreements, start-up companies and
joint ventures in key business areas."

Zietz will team with Darren Lacey, executive director
of the Johns Hopkins University Information Security
Institute, in seeking to establish added presence for Johns
Hopkins in the corporate arena, and to communicate
effectively with businesses about opportunities for
interaction with the university.

Zietz since 1998 has been director of the Abell Venture
Fund, a $30 million effort of Baltimore's Abell Foundation
to stimulate development of technology-related businesses in
Baltimore and Maryland. She specialized in information
technology investments.

Before joining the Abell Fund, Zietz spent 11 years as
partner and director of research at New Enterprise
Associates of Baltimore, the country's largest early stage
venture fund. Earlier, she was a securities analyst at
Eppler, Guerin & Turner in Dallas, and a systems analyst at
RepublicBank in Dallas, where she co-founded the high-tech
lending group.

Zietz graduated in 1971 from Columbia University, and
earned a master of library sciences degree from North Texas
University in 1978 and an MBA from Southern Methodist
University in 1985.

The new Office of Licensing and Technology Development,
headed by Tew, will provide a clearly defined, single point
of contact for intellectual property management, technology
transfer and licensing for discoveries and inventions from
the university's eight schools. It consolidates two
previously separate units, the Office of Technology Transfer
at the Homewood campus and the Office of Technology
Licensing at the School of Medicine. In addition to heading
the new office, Tew will retain his position as assistant
dean of the School of Medicine, where he has directed
technology licensing activities since 2000.

The Office of Licensing and Technology Development will
provide intellectual property management and licensing
services for the School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of
Public Health, School of Nursing, Whiting School of
Engineering, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, Nitze
School of Advanced International Studies, Peabody Institute
and School of Professional Studies in Business and
Education. The Applied Physics Laboratory will maintain its
separate licensing office.

Joining Tew in the leadership of new office are Deb
Barbara as senior director of technology development and R.
Keith Baker as senior director of licensing. They are
responsible for marketing the university's intellectual
property and supervising the licensing program,
respectively.

Tew received his Ph.D. in bio-inorganic chemistry from
the University of Idaho in 1976 and came to the Johns
Hopkins School of Medicine that year as a postdoctoral
fellow in physiological chemistry. After completing his
fellowship, he joined the school's faculty. In 1980, he
founded Chesapeake Biological Laboratories Inc., one of
Maryland's first biotech firms, where he was chief executive
officer and chairman for two decades.

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